


Get me out of here

by alutea



Series: Infinite Jest: Third Time Will Be the Charm, Maybe [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Essays, Infinite Jest - Freeform, Other, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:22:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27369484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alutea/pseuds/alutea
Summary: Help, it's the marijuana chapter again.
Relationships: David Foster Wallace's brilliant mind/Reader
Series: Infinite Jest: Third Time Will Be the Charm, Maybe [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1991284





	Get me out of here

Chapter 2 - Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

I have smoked marijuana once in my life. (Er, first-hand. I have also been to a Bob Dylan concert.) I was visiting a good friend in New York and he asked if I wanted to try it. Being the type of person who is both risk-adverse and willing to try almost anything once, I said yes. We took turns sipping from a tiny hole made in a half-crushed coke can. (Not being a pot-head himself, he didn't have a bong, which I gather is the equipment one would normally use in such a situation.)

It was, in a word, underwhelming. We went out afterwards to get dinner. The streetlights wouldn't focus, as if I were trying to look at them through raindrops. Everything else was normal. I didn't get the munchies. Food didn't taste any different. Music didn't sound any different. I got sleepy shortly thereafter and went to sleep. No odd dreams, no ill effects in the morning.

The kind of focus that Erdedy has on weed and his obtaining it and his using it feels familiar and foreign and organic, a whirlpool of thought that I'm usually trying to escape from by reading or writing. To be pulled into it makes me slightly panicky and somewhat impatient. 

The insect, I suppose, acts like a touchstone to the outside world, an alternative object of attention that gives both Erdedy and the readers a moment of relief before being sucked back into the undertow. It's like DFW's peeled back the skin and cracked open the skull of a self-absorbed brain to expose its inner workings to the open air, something he comes back to in "The Depressed Person" from _Interviews with Hideous Men_. Except that the Depressed Person's focus never shifts from herself, her own misery, which makes the experience even more torturous.

Having lost touch with reality and been mired in inaction, Erdedy is completely unable to make a choice when the outside world finally intrudes.

That, too, feels familiar.

This short chapter reads like it goes on forever.

Stuff DFW made me look up:

  * [Tito Puente](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito_Puente) \- an American musician, songwriter and record producer known as "The Musical Pope", "El Rey de los Timbales" (The King of the Timbales) and "The King of Latin Music."




End file.
